From the Top (5 page)

We are zipping along, though, and movement—movement of your own accord, I should say—is freedom made manifest. You really can't overstate that one, even if you're just popping over to the donut shop for coffee and a cruller. The world holds people
by the millions who have never known the feeling of freewheeling. I try to remember this when I look up and see I still have half a day's drive ahead of me before I see the ones I love. I try to remind myself then that the intervening miles are not to be overcome but rather to be sailed. It's a blessing, the open road.

I used to spend a lot of time on the road with truckers, writing about their work and ways. My Uncle Stan was a trucker, and one of the few people for whom I still entertain the word
hero.
He took me across the country on eighteen wheels when I was a young man, and thus I gratefully blame his memory for the itch I feel when I'm on the back forty and hear the distant hollow howl of a set of doolies crossing the interstate rumble strip. Uncle Stan taught me to read the road; when you see a dark patch on the concrete, you watch for a bump just prior—the dark patch is caused by drops of oil jarred from the pans of thousands of vehicles as they hit that uneven spot. Not all of the road signs are mounted on posts. Some are laid right out there in the road for you to see, if you will only pay attention.

And now we're back to metaphor, which is fine, because if we can take a lesson from a thing, we should. And if we can turn sightseeing into insightseeing, well, that might make a little progress toward a better world. On the other hand, sometimes the best thing is to just let the road unroll, let the wheels carry you body and soul, let the miles flow around your head and through it, let those towns and those Townes songs cycle through, and rather than worry about fitting everything between square corners just roll and roll and roll on, knowing that the end of the road will arrive in its own fashion, in its own time.

Back home on the farm I've been running behind. That in and of itself isn't news—running behind is a way of life for me—but there is some waxing and waning, and lately it's been all waxing, and I'm not talking about reshaping my eyebrows, although based on recent trends toward mutant overgrowth I might add that to the list.

I'd like to point out that I'm not complaining about being “too busy,” which has become the leading American form of humble-bragging reality avoidance and is usually more a reflection of privileged pursuits woven with a perversion of priorities than it is of overwork (and let the record show that I include myself in the allegation). But in this case I'm referring not to the “busyness” itself but rather the behavior that lands me there. Specifically, fits of manic optimism in which I resolve to write three books, a magazine article, and an album of original country music songs featuring the kazoo, split a winter's worth of wood, clean the granary, build the kids a clubhouse, mow the lawn, distill three pints of artisanal chive blossom vinegar, floss my diastema, pay the electric bill, plant cucumbers, take the kids fishing, write a love note to my wife, write a thank you note to my wife, locate the power steering leak, answer all red-flagged emails, adjust my deer stand, clean the gutters, take that one thing down to the pole barn, take those forty-seven things out of the pole barn, put eighteen new strings on three old guitars, replace the batteries in the headlamp I use to close the chicken coop door after dark,
figure out why the guinea pig is acting so weird, figure out why I'm acting so weird, get those one-cent stamps to bring my postcard stamps up to speed after the latest rate hike, figure out why our internet is acting like it's powered by an off-kilter guinea pig, stack the wood I haven't split yet, read that one book in the stack of all the other books that got there because they were that one book I hadn't read yet, learn once and for all how to spell the word
privilege,
lubricate the treadmill, make more time to clean the gutters since I left it too long, churn the compost, finish that dealio I told that guy I'd do by Sunday, this being Saturday, call the bank to see that the check for the health insurance cleared, and, and, and …

Deep breath.

You know what's astounding about that list? It represents any given manic Monday. You know what's even more astounding? The fact that it takes me clear into Thursday before I realize: it ain't gonna happen. Because it never does. Never has. Not even close. Hope blooms eternal, despite all well-established evidence to the contrary. And so about twice a year I get fed up with all this random mental meandering and I become very firm with myself. I sit and I whittle everything down and I make a list. It's a ruthless process, and it yields a short, tight set of bullet points. No trivialities. No distractions. Lean and mean. From here on in, I really mean it, and I prove it by putting a headline above the bullet points—just one word, in all capital letters: PRIORITIES.

I just clicked over and had a look at the current all-capital PRIORITIES list. Thirty-six items. And that's not including any of the silly ones on the list I just shared with you.

I'm tired of running behind. It's time to buckle down. First order of business, keep the word PRIORITIES in all caps, but also underlined and in bold red. Yes. I'll add it to the list. Oh, and rotate the tires … and tack down that loose shingle … and …

Back home on the farm the other day a fellow human being and I stood out in the wide open air and conversed at length on a difficult subject. The subject was not resolved, but that was never the expectation. Rather, we wound up marveling at the rare privilege of engaging in a discussion driven by neither rage nor rhetoric.

These days we are neck-deep in opinionators. The plumber is a pundit and your aunt is Tweeting talking points. 'Course, anytime I use the phrase “these days” I am revealing my own creeping codgerism, a condition encroaching on my soul at a rate corollary to the recession of my hairline. Fact is, vituperative verbal smackdowns are nothing new. Civil discourse has waxed and waned since Socrates took the hemlock, and you know you could always find some grump down at the end of the Athenian coffee bar who could snort into his macchiato and tell you that chowderhead Socrates was no Anaxagoras.

When I was a much younger man, my politics were firmly settled. My friend Gene's were settled exactly the opposite. We pelted each other with ideologic regurgitations, and when Gene moved away we continued to skirmish via photocopied newsletters, articles, and statistics highlighted and triple-underlined and (this being the pre-internet age) fired to-and-fro via the US Postal Service. It was a sweet coincidence then, when—each having composed a letter unbeknownst to the other—our terms of ceasefire crossed in the mail. Realizing we were at risk of killing
our friendship with someone else's ammunition, we decided to put an end to the broadsides.

So often we find ourselves longing for nuance. For thoughtful exchange. For the chance to think out loud, take it back, and try again. I once received a very angry note from a man who said he was so torqued off by something I had written in a book that he threw it down immediately and would never read another word I wrote, which I take to mean he never got around to the part seven pages later where I retracted the passage that scorched his shorts in the first place.

I love my wife because on a regular basis she allows me to say the wrong thing, back up, reboot, and retry. She has this reasonableness about her. Proven in part by the fact that I once told her I loved her because of her reasonableness, and yet—having just received the complimentary equivalent of a vacuum cleaner for Christmas—she stayed with me.

At some point you have to make the call. Agreeing to disagree is by and large a theoretical privilege. And somebody has to lead the charge, speaking—or even braying—in the argot of attack and counterattack. To stir it up and take the flak. Was everyone a waffling muddler like me, no issue would be raised, no dragons slain. But we wafflers have a role too: to listen, absorb, chew things over, just stand there boots on the ground and hands in pockets, shooting the breeze and not each other.

Four hundred–plus years ago my favorite dead Frenchman, Montaigne, wrote that “harmony is a wholly tedious quality in conversation.” In other words, there is more to be learned by knocking heads than nodding them in unison. But he didn't stick the word
conversation
in there by accident. He assumed we would convene in disagreement, but that we would indeed convene, and once convened would converse.

Eventually, back there on my farm, the man got in his pickup truck and drove away, and as I went about my chores I figured each of us had been convinced of maybe nothing save the value
of humane exchange. We were staying with each other, working the corners and angles from all sides, trying for education over insinuation. Being reasonable.

Seems like a fine place to start.

Sometimes people ask how I get to the Big Top Chautauqua tent every weekend, especially in winter. Truth is, the tent is rolled and stashed in a shed from mid-September through early June; Mount Ashwabay is, after all, a ski hill in northern Wisconsin. And although the music is recorded live, my presence on the radio show is often accomplished via what I call “theater of the mind”—also known as the room above my garage.

But I do perform in person under the actual canvas several times each year and can conjure the feel of the tent in a trice, with just one line:

Welcome back to Tent Show Radio, folks, from the backstage dressing room with the one lonely little lightbulb burnin' …

Just between you and me, there is more than one lonely little lightbulb back there. But when I'm trying to find the mood, I turn all those other lights off. I thrive in dimness. Draw your own conclusions.

In the book
Truck: A Love Story,
I wrote about my first visit to Big Top Chautauqua. I trimmed it up and tamped it down and did it like this for the radio show.

Welcome back to
Tent Show Radio,
folks, from the backstage dressing room with the one lonely little lightbulb burnin' …

I've been sitting here quietly during the break, using the solitude to make a little run down memory lane, back to the first time I ever came to the Big Top. Memory lane in this case is State Trunk Highway 13, more specifically the abbreviated terminal dogleg portion that runs east-west along the uppermost rooster-comb of the good state of Wisconsin. I was in my faithful old Chevy Malibu, and there was a woman riding beside me, a woman possessed of various powers, the most pertinent of which to this day she transmits via a pair of blue eyes clear as sky and bright as diamonds. I didn't know it then, but I was a bachelor on my way to becoming not a bachelor.

We were driving like we were in love … lazing along, holding hands, breaking eye contact just long enough so I could negotiate the curves and swerve around tourists and turtles. It's a good drive for lovers, that eastbound stretch of 13. You've got the southern shore of Gitche Gumee right there at your driver's side elbow. Some days the water is incandescent blue and hopeful, other days it looks all steel gray and ship-sinky. On the
gray days you'll want to roll that window down so you can feel the bite of the wind and then—for the full effect—cue up some Gordon Lightfoot. Out of respect, you are not allowed to roll the window back up until “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is fully concluded.

Port Wing. Herbster. We made our way, the distance between Highway 13 and the Great Lake waxing and waning until we stopped for smoked fish and a used book about Lenny Bruce from a shop in Cornucopia. We ate the fish shoreside, and the wind was a cold scour, but we sat close, and among other things, love is Sterno. In short, I was a goner, and by the time we hit the curl at Red Cliff that drops you down to Bayfield I was prepared to complete the necessary paperwork, and said so.

The woman in question informed me that we had known each other only three months and she would make her decision only after conducting a performance review at the six-month mark. That, I said at the time, was a rolled-up newspaper to the snoot.

By sunset, however, we had made our way to Mount Ashwabay, and I shall never forget the sight of this tent, a blue burst against the surrounding green, looking from a distance like a squat storybook caterpillar with its stripes of pearl gray. We got there early enough to sit in the grass and watch the crowd filter in, and it really is something to see them gather, everybody milling but quietly so, folks passing in and out of the tent and clusters of friends meeting up to have beers in the grass or eat bratwurst in the concession tent. As the light faded, the crowd gathered and turned itself inward, as if the people were metal filings and the big tent—lit from within now by bare bulbs strung through the quarter poles—was an electromagnet on a rheostat. We allowed ourselves to be drawn in as well. Then the house lights went down, the stage lights came up, and when, three months later, the woman with the blue eyes said for better or worse she too was willing to fill out the paperwork, well, I knew that our night in the Big Top had something to do with it.

You hear that? The crowd has returned. I wonder if somebody out there is sitting beside some other body, wondering if they too might find love beneath the canvas. It happens, you bet. So as the lights come down, go on and pull that somebody special a tad closer and let the music and the canvas do the rest …

Welcome back to
Tent Show Radio,
folks. The audience is returning from intermission after having had an opportunity—as they used to say in grander days—to “take the air.” No better place to take the air, really, than up here on the open face of Mount Ashwabay. This is enhanced air; air that has been scrubbed by Lake Superior breezes, filtered for freshness through stands of pine and poplar, and infused with the sound of song. I dare say this is edifying air, air that stimulates your cultural and intellectual improvement. Goodness knows I can stand a few lungfuls. If I were the kind of guy to hire a life coach—well, first of all I'd have to hire six, and they'd have to take shifts. Even then they'd all probably just knock off early and hit the bar to gorge on pickled eggs and do Jäger bombs in a desperate attempt to repress everything as quickly as possible.